If you spend the money to put in an alarm system on your home or business, make sure you check with your local police and fire departments to make sure there isn’t some sort of fee and/or permit required. Otherwise, you could be like the Kansas City car dealer who watched a break-in attempt live on his phone while police ignored the alarm.

The used-car dealer had already been a robbery victim once this year, losing more than $50,000 in cars and tools to thieves. So he recently spent $2,200 to had ADT install an alarm system.

Problem is, he claims no one ever told him about the city ordinance that requires the payment of a $45 permit in order to have police respond to the alarm.

So when his alarm went off on Monday evening, he was able to watch a live video feed from his business on his smartphone, but no police officers came to check on the disturbance.

“Nobody told me I was supposed to have a permit for an alarm,” he tells KCTV 5. “It’s an alarm, that’s it. They installed it and that was it, I thought I was done. Nobody sent me anything, the alarm company did not tell me anything and I was not told by anybody that I need an additional form for them to show up.”

Kansas City (the Missouri one) police confirmed to KCTV that cops will not respond to an alarm unless the permit is on file, and that it is up to the alarm system provider to let the customer know about this.

The lesson here is that many local authorities require permits/fees for alarm systems, often to mitigate their liability and the costs of responding to every false alert caused by people who punched in the wrong code.

So if you get a system installed, be sure to contact your local police to make sure that all the red tape has been cut so that you’re not paying for an expensive system that just makes a lot of noise.

That was my thought, too. If I ran that police department, it’d want to have a $90 fine for police responding to an alarm call when the alarm isn’t registered (not sure on the local laws regarding this, but it’s a hypothetical so deal with it); citizen still gets service but has an incentive to register but the police still get paid.

I think I’m okay with this. The police want some small monetary commitment from the alarm system owner to show that they understand the rules.
In some places, the police spend a lot of time answering false-positive alarms, which can prevent them from answering higher priority calls in a timely fashion.
I think it might be a better idea to have some sort of bond which could be revoked when/if the business has a lot of false positives.

If a crime is clearly in progress, it’s the police’s responsibility to respond to the incident. If the dealer is watching the break-in live, and the police refuse to respond because of a fee, then they’re a protection racket, not police. The dealer might even be successful having his lawyer apply RICO to them.